Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xiv, 327 pp. (Figures, map.) US$54.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3889-8.
Ferocious fighting erupted between Lao spectators and visiting Vietnamese team members at the end of a 1936 soccer match in Vientiane. No fighting marred the 2009 Southeast Asian Games held in Vientiane; instead Laos received an International Olympic Committee award for the nation’s “outstanding effort in the promotion of sport in Laos … [and] for fulfilling … Olympic ideals” (230). These two events respectively introduce and conclude Creak’s argument. However, the intervening pages are about much more than sporting progress in Laos.
Embodied Nation argues that sport and physical culture have been used by a series of Lao governments in attempts to inspire the populace to support and enact the political vision of its leaders. Or, as Creak writes: “Successive regimes have called on sport and physical culture as modes of subject formation with the ultimate objective of constituting, performing, and reinforcing state power” (240). The arguments of Embodied Nation are convincingly supported by an impressive array of archival and secondary sources in three languages: English, French, and Lao, and by data from the author’s field work in Laos.
Laos is a particularly good place to observe the relationship between physicality and the body politic. In little more than a century, Laotians experienced four different political systems with differing ideologies: colonialism, royalist /nationalism, socialist revolution, and post-socialism. Creak illustrates his thesis with carefully detailed examples from each. In each example, the sporting subjects are primarily male. It was the male body and a robust masculinity that these governments summoned to reinforce state unity and power.
Examples of the relationship between physicality and politics begin with tikhi, a pre-colonial Lao ritual game, and continue respectively with the Vichy French colonial emphasis on physical training, sport as political theater in the Kingdom of Laos, controversy over representation of a divided Laos at regional sports events, socialist culture of physicality to mobilize the revolution, and, finally, the 2009 Southeast Asian Games. Tikhi was interpreted by early French colonizers as the national sport of Laos as the French sought to develop a distinct cultural identity for this newly constituted unit of French Indochina. Western sport arrived in Laos during the Vichy French period of World War II (1941–1945) with ideas about the body derived from Nazi sources. These ideas are well summarized by the chapter title: “Renovating the body, restoring the nation/race” (52). The Lao Nhay cultural renovation movement and French officials implemented these ideas by establishing sporting clubs, leagues, and events and by promulgating a new cultural view of masculinity illustrated in published drawings and photographs of muscular and diligent young men. Building on these new physical culture ideas, Laos moved toward nationhood under French tutelage emphasizing militarization and military masculinity.
The 1961 and 1964 National Games in the Kingdom of Laos under the Royal Lao Government (RLG) illustrate the use of sport to showcase national unity in the stadium at a time when political power was highly contested. Creak notes that “ideas and practices linking the athletic body to national destiny were evidence of major changes in political culture” (139). The growing Cold War-related conflict in Laos was manifested in its attendance at the 1966 non-aligned nations Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO). The RLG team represented Laos in the 1963 GANEFO games (Laos was still officially neutral at that time), but refused the invitation to attend in 1966 (the RLG was closely allied with the U.S. by then), so a communist Neo Lao Hak Sat team represented Laos there, arousing the ire of royalist editors in Vientiane. Therefore, the Cold War played out in regional sporting events as well as in other venues (166).
The Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) came to power in 1975 determined to create the “new socialist person.” A “mass sport and physical culture movement” could create these healthy, strong, resolute, and politically knowledgeable persons who could then build and strengthen the “national body politic” (167–168). Official reports on this project were mostly of the failure to build such a movement among the masses. The LPRP had better success in “mobilizing the revolution” through elite-level spectator sports (195). Spectator sporting events sponsored by the state reinforced the idea of Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) unity under the Party. Friendship competitions with other socialist countries fostered a sense of membership in the socialist family of nations, and, with participation in the 1980 Moscow Olympics, of visibility on the world stage. The accomplishments of outstanding women athletes and teams were well publicized internally, promoting the official ideology of equality between the sexes. But the revolutionary period did not endure. The Party retained its political power, but, beginning in 1986, began planning for capitalist economic development. Leaping quickly over the early post-socialist period to the final chapter, Creak focuses on the 2009 Southeast Asian Games, the Lao PDR’s “latest and undoubtedly greatest performance of the link between physical contests, ideas, and practices, on the one hand, and politics and culture, on the other” (231). The unprecedented cheering, flag-waving, excitement, and joyful expression of national pride during and immediately after the Games were genuine, but the ultimate beneficiary was the secretive LPRP and the authoritarian state it remorselessly directs.
Creak’s work extends and specifies theory and scholarship about sport culture and politics with this detailed case study. Embodied Nation addresses aspects of Lao society (sport and physical culture, masculinity) that have not yet been explored, at least in English language scholarly work. Creak’s extensive referencing of official Lao and French language documents may guide other researchers to similar useful sources. Advanced students, scholars, and practitioners in the following fields will be interested in this well-written and scholarly work: history, culture, and politics of Laos and Southeast Asia; sport and culture; and gender studies, especially masculinity.
Carol Ireson-Doolittle
Willamette University, Salem, USA
pp. 194-196